Reasonable Prices, Reliable Service?

It is a scientifically proven fact that spammers have an IQ equivalent to a snapping turtle. And this guy is proof positive.

I've gotten about 5 copies of the following email in the last two days:

Most other hosting companies make a lot of empty promises. We guarantee you only two things: 1) You will pay us $250 per week for hosting. 2) Your site will never go down. Period.

Oh, good! I'm currently paying $100 per year for my hosting, but I'd certainly pass that up for the opportunity to spend $250 per week. That seems so much better.

Well, this idiot spammer happens to have a yahoo email address, and a PayPal account associated with it, so I knew it wasn't forged. I fired off an email to abuse@yahoo.com (the yahoo abuse department), and waited for a response.

This is the reply I received:

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

In this particular case, we have taken appropriate action against the Yahoo! account in question, as per our Terms of Service (TOS). For further details about the Yahoo! TOS, you can visit:

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

This is fairly standard, and I thought "That's the end of that spammer!"

Not so.

This morning I received the following email from the same spammer--with a different email address:

Join our PINACLE AFFILIATE PROGRAM and we will provide you with free daily proxies for mailing into AOL and General Internet.

You can sell the HOTTEST product on the Internetright now - it's called PINACLE, and it's a [deleted for the sake of young readers]

Now I'm sorry, but this guy is just plain stupid. He's got himself a new email address, but he's spammed the same people he had spammed the day before! Does he really think we're not going to notice the fact that he's gone from peddling websites to peddling male...uh...enhancement drugs?

Doesn't he realize I'm just going to get this email address canceled too?

A Helpful HintThere is a lesson that can be learned from this (besides the standard 'Spammers are stupid' lesson) The lesson is this: you know absolutely nothing about the people who spam you (other than the fact that they are idiots). And therefore you have no reason to trust anything they say. This guy makes it sound like $250 per week is a great value for website hosting. Do the math on that. It's $13,000 per year for them to host a website. Is that a great value? not by a long shot!

Always assume the spammer is lying to you. After all, as 'anonymous' as spamming is, the spammer really has no reason to tell you the truth about anything.